Wednesday, April 26, 2017

PRC-13 Dice Roller

A couple Christmases ago, I made this dice roller for my eldest son using mostly off-the-shelf parts from Radio Shack (RIP) and Home Depot, with the only actual military surplus part being the handset.

In the Army, most of our radios started with the prefix PRC, and 13 is my lucky number. Hence, the PRC-13.

The enclosure is a plastic "job box" from Radio Shack. The two D-handles are cabinet handles from Home Depot. The knobs are just random plastic knobs I found at one of those two stores, and the toggle switch was probably from Radio Shack.

The tube for rolling the dice is a corrugated plastic flexi-pipe from Home Depot. You can buy it by the foot, which was good since I didn't need even that much. As an added bonus, the ridges in the pipe help make the dice tumble.

And here is where the dice come out. The backstop to keep the dice from flying off into space is an army surplus H-250/U that I hot-glued to the wooden base. The cable is held down by a tiny zip tie.

I had planned to cover the base with a DoD military grid map, like this one:

...but I ran out of time. Still, I think the dice roller turned out pretty well.